For more than a century, scientists have raced to unravel the human family tree and have grappled with its complications. Now, with an astonishing new discovery, everything we thought we knew about primate origins could change. Lying inside a high-security vault, deep within the heart of one of the world’s leading natural history museums, is the scientiﬁc ﬁnd of a lifetime – a perfectly fossilized early primate, older than the previously most famous primate fossil, Lucy, by an astonishing forty-four million years.

A secret until now, the fossil - "Ida" to the researchers who have painstakingly veriﬁed her provenance – is the most complete early primate fossil ever found. 47 million years old, Ida rewrites what we’ve assumed about the earliest primate origins. So much of what we understand about evolution comes from partial fossils and even single bones, but Ida’s fossilization offers much more than that, from a haunting "skin shadow" to her stomach contents. And, remarkably, knowledge of her discovery and existence almost never saw the light of day.

With exclusive access to the ﬁrst scientists to study her, the award-winning science writer Colin Tudge tells the history of Ida and her place in the world. The Link offers a wide-ranging investigation into Ida and our earliest origins – and the magniﬁcent, cutting-edge scientiﬁc detective story that followed her discovery. At the same time, it opens a stunningly evocative window into our past and changes what we know about the evolution of primates and, ultimately, ourselves.

Hi all,for further reading on this and other articles related to to this field of study, here is another link from sciencedaily.comin fact at sciencedaily.com you can set up an rss feed reader to get the latest news in a lot of different catagories of science. here's the rss feed for anthropologyhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/rss/fossils_ruins/anthropology.xml (join this to the line above at the slash)or try this RSS link to Anthropology, hopefully it will work.

It has come to my attention that there is some real scientific controversey over whether this fossil belonged to the primate group anncestral to anthropoid monkeys (and consequently humans), so we can't claim anything about this fossil being our ancestor (at least not yet). Furthermore, Answers in Genesis posted something on their site which I tear to shreds here:

thanks aigbusted,It has come to my attention that there is some real scientific controversey over whether this fossil belonged to the primate group anncestral to anthropoid monkeys (and consequently humans), so we can't claim anything about this fossil being our ancestor (at least not yet).there's the beauty in building Quality Knowledge; Cross-checking your information.

Its just a process that should happen to everything from missing links, to utility bills, to human origins, to whether Jesus was God or not.

I say again,The real test is how consistent it is with established knowledge.

danielg said: Do you know how many times evolutionary believers have announced the fossil that will be the savior of the evolutionary farce? The true missing link?Daniel, evolution is not a "farce" despite Hank Hanegraaff's book title. I do understand where you are coming from as I thought the same thing for over 20 years of my life when I was a creationist. Daniel, if you would do some objective investigation, and I do mean objective, you would discover how overwhelming the evidence for evolution really is, so much so that scientists no longer question the fact of evolution, only the various mechanisms. There are even a number of evangelical Christian scholars who have written in defense of evolution because of the evidence.

As far as the "missing links" go this is really media hype which I really hate. Scientists haven't been looking for "missing links" for some time, rather, they see mountains of evidence for various "transitional features" in the fossil record and Ida (and yes even Tiktaalik) is no different. Whether this fossil lives up to all of the hype doesn't change the fact that evolution has occurred and will continue to do so.

I wouldn't expect palentologists to accept this finding without first looking at it. To be honest, I initially wondered why such a finding was not first published in a peer reviewed journal, since that's the usual protocol. We'll see.

TD, your comments are just simply childish. No one has called this fossil a "hoax" and notice that it is evolutionary scientists that are disputing the nature of the find. I personally wondered what all of the hoopla was about anyway. It appears more than likely that we have a lot of grand standing so someone can make a name for themselves (although I could be wrong). This fossil does not make or break the theory of evolution.